Do you want to buy a notebook? Government-issued
laptops for kids are increasingly being offered by international
organizations and corporations as a viable shortcut to help bridge the
digital divide in developing countries, and the brazilian government
wants to start paving this shortcut as soon as possible. Federal
authorities are working on an international procurement process and
have already earmarked US$ 30 million to buy the first 150,000 notebook computers, which will be deployed on a pilot program.

Mobilis, the underdog from Encore

According to ComputerWorld
(portuguese only), a government official stated that this international
procurement process was chosen in order to let every interested
organization do their bidding. And there should be many offers, as
international PC makers are already avidly probing this market:
brazilian kids are testing the OLPC XO, also known as the US$ 100 laptop, Intel’s Classmate PC, and the lesser known Encore Mobilis (pictured above), from India, also a developing country.

The brazilian open source community
watches every move of this game with increasing attention as it
approaches an important decision. All 3 alternatives support Linux, but
proprietary OS makers aren’t known for forfeiting this kind of match:
the Classmate PC officially supports Windows too, and the OLPC
sometimes isn’t very assertive about Windows running on their bright-colored computers.

This is an important step, nonetheless. When effectively deployed,
these first 150,000 computers will help evaluate how to extend similar
programs to all brazilian students – no small feat, considering that
there are more than 50 million students enrolled in brazilian public
schools today.

SERPRO,
the main IT solution provider for the Brazilian Government, is actively
using Plone and Zope as its primary Portal construction tool for
Government Web Content Management Solutions. SERPRO counts on an
impressive list of reference and will soon launch its 50th governmental
portal.

As the largest IT institution in the Brazilian Federal Government,
SERPRO is providing many key services to the 10th largest economy in
the World. SERPRO is responsible for all IT services within the
Ministry of Finance and key information systems for the federal
government. Principal products are Internet access services, Intranet
portal solutions, consultancy and network communication services, and
government applications (cities, states and federal).

WindowMaker,
the lightweight window manager that closely mimics NextStep’s look and
feel, was at the peak of its own popularity chart some 5 or 6 years
ago, when it was shipped as default GUI in some Linux distros, and
offered as a standard alternative by most of them. Since then, it was
put in some sort of unofficial maintenance mode by its authors.

Alfredo Kojima, the brazilian hacker that started WindowMaker
development when he was still in university and wanted to offer an
alternative to AfterStep, recently had a short interview (in portuguese only) with BR-Linux about the current status and plans for the project.

According to media-shy Kojima, now a GUI developer for MySQL AB and
formerly a developer for brazilian distro Conectiva (now part of
Mandriva) - where he wrote the first version of the popular Synaptic Package Manager,
it’s hard to get motivated to maintain WindowMaker’s code in his scarce
idle time, but he is still very attached to the project. “I got my
first job, at Conectiva, thanks to WindowMaker, and the people at my
current job at MySQL also knew the project and my part on it”, he tells.

Asked if the project is in official hiatus or even closed, Kojima
gives some hope to those who still prefer the beautiful GUI of his
brainchild: “The intention is to keep working on it when possible”, he
says, but both him and Dan Pascu (the other prominent historical wmaker
developer) are deeply involved in other technology projects for now.

Despite looking a little dated when compared to today’s minimalistic
window managers, WindowMaker is still used today, by old and new fans.
In fact, die hard brazilian WindowMaker fans are even starting to
regroup themselves with help of Wmaker Cyaneus, a community site dedicated to WindowMaker tips, tricks, themes, help and discussion.

According to IDG Now,
Microsoft had a meeting last Wednesday (02/07) with brazilian
government authorities to present last year’s Linux agreement with
Novell and their joint interoperability strategy.

The story failed to reach other major news outlets, and even on IDG
Now the datails are scarce at best: all we got was the expected bold
declarations by the MS representatives, together with general and
“safe” comments by brazilian government authorities.

But 2 odd facts didn’t go unnoticed: Novell didn’t send any
representative to the meeting (and the government authorities didn’t
like it, IDG Now reports), and the government guys weren’t named in the
report - they even actively asked to remain anonymous when giving their
declarations to the reporter. I wonder why.

Linux.com features a portrait of Sulamita Garcia,
head of Linuxchix Brazil: “A lot of people have bemoaned the lack of
women participating in open source communities, but Sulamita Garcia is
one of the few who have stepped up to do something about it. A
Slackware user from Florianopolis, Brazil, Garcia has been heading up
LinuxChix Brazil for four years.”

After the first fiasco,
the brazilian judiciary insists that Internet Censorship is a good
thing. I haven’t found any news articles about it in english yet, but
you can read the news in portuguese (or an automated translation). A court ordered the major brazilian ISPs to block another site. Now the target is not a big site, but a tourism agency that got some attention from the brazilian media recently, in news related to sexual tourism in Brazil.
It seems that at least the ISP I am using right now (BrasilTelecom)
haven’t implemented the block yet. But considering that on the YouTube blocking case
they have done this immediately after receiving the court notification,
I think it is just a matter of time until ISPs receive a notification
and implement the new block.

A
nice idea turned into a pirated software magnet? Users were replacing
their pre-installed Linux with unlicensed Windows copies, and some of
the reasons for these defections were addressed by today’s annoucement.
But there are many other open issues still waiting for an answer.

Computador para Todos
is a government project that offers special tax exemptions and lines of
credit for popular (low end) computer makers in Brazil, as long as the
computers are sold with Linux and an array of 26 pre-installed free
software common applications, like a word processor, an e-mail client
and other apps surely found in most Linux distros. The tax exemption is
only valid if the PC is sold for less than R$ 1200 (about US$ 550),
retail.

According to official estimatives, more than 800,000 PCs were sold
using these tax exemptions and lines of credit in 2006, with a wide
variety of international and local brands of Linux distros installed,
despite claims
that roughly 73% of the customers replace the pre-installed Linux
distro with unlicensed Windows XP copies, less than 4 weeks after
buying the computer.

Something old

There were several accounts
of users telling the press and community sites that their “Computador
para Todos” came without essential hardware drivers (like the ones
needed by onboard software modems) or poorly configured hardware setups
(USB ports not working, unable to record CDs…). Reportedly, all the
user had to do to get things up and running smoothly was reinstall
Linux from the included CD-ROM, but apparently many found out that it
wasn’t hard to call somebody willing to lend a hand and install an
unlicensed copy of Windows instead.

The local Linux community has been issuing alerts and suggestions
about the situation since the first accounts of insufficiently
configured computers being sold, because of the obvious negative
implications that these events can have, specially on brazilian mainstream media.
Most of the suggestions are based on the general idea that there must
be some sort of quality control of the “certified” PCs, including their
OS setup and basic hardware support, and that the mandatory user
support must be improved to go beyond the levels offered by the unknown
individuals who “support” the install of unlicensed Windows.

Something new

To date, there was no answer from the government about these alerts
issued by the community, and no word indicating that we will see
revisions of the quality control process or support requirements. But
today the brazilian branch of IDG News Service reported some related good news: roughly 16 months after its first announcement, the basic mandatory hardware setup of the Computador para Todos will be updated.

The new setup is not confirmed yet, but according to government
officials the changes were suggested by hardware manufacturers, and
intend to build a more up-to-date configuration, without the need for
diskette drives, and accepting 14″ LCD monitors as a (more than) valid
substitute for the previously mandated 15″ CRT ones.

Users will be specially glad to know that the amount of installed
RAM will be doubled, from the previous almost insufferable 128MB to the
almost sufficient (for most uses) 256MB.

Something borrowed, something blue

In this particular case, the absence of news (about the quality
control and support) is not good news, and the brazilian community
keeps on waiting for a position or even some hint of changes in this
aspect of the program.

But the updated hardware configuration is excelent news: 128MB is
not enough for most common applications, specially in the cases where
the PC maker ships distros with advanced desktop environments, and
applications that are memory hogs like OpenOffice. Can you imagine how
long it takes to load OpenOffice running on KDE, both with default
configurations, on a cheap PC with 128MB, when some of this RAM is
being shared with the video board, and a software modem is working?
Many brazilian users know.

Offering some contrast, the local press today announced that Kenya will lauch a similar program,
and they will start already with a quality assurance program in place,
hardware manufacturers certification, universities acting as
incubators, and 256MB of available RAM.

We don’t know if they are using open source software (we do hope
so), but we know that they expect to sell their computers for a little
less than the Computador para Todos. We wish them good luck,
and also that other similar programs around the world may
cross-polynize in the future, to avoid putting aditional hurdles on the
bridges over the digital divide.

No, no, said the installer - this app needs Firefox. ‘Surely you are mistaken, we’re using a fully compatible ersatz
variation’, replied the Tux Vermelho guys to the installer, to no
avail. But later they found out that it’s not hard to tell IceWeasel to
pretend to be Firefox when it comes to identify itself to servers and
apps - and they wrote a small tutorial.

Just a few clicks (go to about:config and change the value of general.useragent.extra.firefox), but maybe it would be simpler to just use the original open source app instead of resorting to fake IDs.

But there’s one more reason to rejoice: this law also determines
that Open Source solutions shall be preferred when implementing this
Justice digitalization. There’s no clear definition of what will be
accepted as an open source solution - no reference to OSIS’s Open Source Definition,
for instance - and what exactly it means to be a preferred solution.
But, at the very least, it’s a step in the right direction.

Dazed and confused? The brazilian Linux community was surprised this week with news about Diebold trying to sell Linux-running PCs
to the brazilian government. And boy, Diebold seems to be having a hard
time selling those “Flux Linux” based PCs to the Ministry of
Communication.

According to brazilian magazine Convergência Digital, the Ministry
of Communication intended to buy 5400 Linux-running PCs from local
hardware sellers, for use in many (planned) new “Telecentros“,
public offices, offered by the federal, state or local government and
similar to internet cafes, where citizens who can’t or won’t afford
their own computers and connectivity may use the government provided
PCs (mostly using open source software) and public internet connections
to search and surf the web, run office applications or educational
softwares.

Diebold’s brazilian subsidiary, Diebold Procomp, offered its PCs, running the previously unheard-of “Flux Linux” distro. All was relatively well, despite other manufacturers’ protests
about unknown issues, but suddenly - on December 28 - the negotiations
deteriorated, and right now are in an uncertain status, and the
Ministry won’t even talk about it on the record. Positivo Informatica,
the second best bidder in the eyes of the Ministry, is trying to push
forward its offer

What surprised the open source community, however, was the fact that
the ministry was in this shopping spree, and didn’t actively confer,
consult or even send a news release to the national Linux community.
When a government project involving open source software goes bad, it’s
not uncommon to hear the same old excuse: the community was unwilling
to help. But the community can’t help if the solution is specified,
developed and bought without as much as a postcard to the community,
warning us that some agency or ministry was willing to buy (and
support) an unheard-of distro.

Lack of communication skills in the Ministry of Communication? No, I don’t think so.